Word: laborer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Israel will spend the next five months fighting about peace, but the fault lines in the Jewish state's election are more about ethnic loyalty than policy. Despite a flurry of "centrist" bids, the May 17 election announced late Monday remains a contest between the traditional foes, Likud and Labor. "People choose between those parties on the basis of cultural affiliation rather than peace plans," says TIME Jerusalem bureau chief Lisa Beyer. "If they're prosperous middle class Ashkenazis (Jews of European origin) they tend to vote Labor; and if they're from the ranks of the aggrieved, disadvantaged Jews...
...peace is not what Shahak is bringing to Israeli politics. The left-center Labor party is worried that the Rabin prot?g? will split the ?peace camp? by siphoning off centrist Labor members. That could force Shahak, Benjamin Netanyahu or Labor leader Ehud Barak to stake out extreme positions in order to attract enough votes to form a majority -- just the sort of frenzied coalition-building that left Netanyahu beholden to hard-liners against the peace process. But nobody?s panicking yet. ?Shahak has run very well in the polls, but it's entirely as an unknown entity,? reminds TIME Jerusalem...
...replace the parliament," Netanyahu said in a televised speech to the Knesset Monday night. "And I agree to replace the parliament." Israel's prime minister says the people support his policies (which are essentially an abandonment of the October Wye Plantation agreement) and that it's the Labor party, which split with Netanyahu's governing coalition after he refused to comply with a scheduled withdrawal of troops from the West Bank, that's ignoring the will of the people...
...right, says TIME reporter Jamil Hammad: "The Palestinians believe that it's Netanyahu who abandoned the Wye and Oslo agreements. In fact, it's the people of Israel who are pushing this. The hopes of the Palestinians that a Labor-led government would make things better have been dashed by the rise of the right." Netanyahu says that he is still committed to the Wye agreement, but pressures from his right mean he keeps adding new conditions to its implementation -- pressures that will only intensify as he looks for votes. The political realities of the next four months leading...
...When they do come off, Netanyahu will face a strong challenge from the Labor party, currently led by Ehud Barak, who is a consistent critic of what Labor calls Netanyahu's abandonment of the peace agreements set in place by Yitzhak Rabin. But there also may be a challenge from popular Lt. General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak. The early line is that Netanyahu will push for new elections just before May 4, the day Yasser Arafat says he will declare an independent Palestinian state. His gamble: that such an ominous deadline will give enough Israelis cold feet to create a majority...